Yuan Wenbin grew up in Yugan county, Jiangxi, on the shores of Poyang Lake. Much of his childhood was spent on his grandfather’s fishing boat.
He recalls lying on deck at night, shining a torch into the water to catch sight of fish. Back then, the waters of the lake, which flow into the Yangtze River, were crystal clear. He could spot juvenile fish and shrimp on the lake bed, two metres down.
His grandfather would tell him tales of ancient animals unique to the Yangtze. Poyang was home to a freshwater dolphin called the baiji, schools of finless porpoises, and migratory birds.
“There’s no way you can imagine how it used to be,” he says. He certainly never imagined that half a century later he would be working as a ranger protecting those porpoises.
Around the year 2000, with baiji numbers plummeting towards the point of functional extinction, the plight of the finless porpoise began to draw concern. A survey in 2006 confirmed a crisis: 1,800 porpoises had been counted, half as many as in 1991. Six years later, another survey found numbers further reduced, only recovering to 1,249 animals in 2022. The species remains critically endangered, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature red list.
There have been designated finless porpoise reserves on the Yangtze since the early 1990s, and work on conserving the species has expanded. However, in December last year, a study published by the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Hydrobiology found that some freshwater protected areas (FPAs) were not meeting conservation needs.
According to the researchers, porpoise numbers fell faster inside FPAs than outside them between 2006 and 2017, and failures to control human activity within FPAs risks them becoming no more than “paper parks” – meaning areas protected on paper but that offer little actual protection.
One of the study’s researchers, and other frontline conservationists, told Dialogue Earth about the difficulties of protecting the finless porpoise in situ. They offered suggestions for improving FPA effectiveness and ensuring the finless porpoise does not suffer the same fate as the baiji.
Creating nature reserves to protect habitats in order to retain and expand existing populations of species.
Ex situ conservation, meanwhile, conserves the species by relocating animals to environments considered more suitable and more manageable, or using artificial breeding programmes.
In situ conservation is often preferred by naturalists because it tries to address the root causes of biodiversity loss.
‘Paper parks’
The crystal-clear waters Yuan recalls are now “like congee”, or rice porridge. He is sensitive to the huge ecological changes that have taken place, with his catch falling every year from the early 1990s.
Yuan learned how serious the plight of the finless porpoises was in 2017. That year, a photographer found an injured animal lying by the side of the lake and Yuan was called to help rescue it. Back when he was a kid, the porpoises weren’t anything special to him. The boat would stop in the middle of the lake and hundreds of porpoises would swim past. The news there were only a thousand or so left in the whole Yangtze came as a shock.
He signed up with a conservation organisation as a volunteer ranger, patrolling Poyang. In 2021, fishing on key parts of the Yangtze, including Poyang, was banned for 10 years. Yuan got a job with an organisation charged with enforcing the ban, which meant continuing to guard the lake reserve and other nearby areas where the finless porpoise is active.
Poyang, China’s largest freshwater lake, is home to almost half of the population of finless porpoises. The provincial government created a 6,800-hectare reserve for the animal here in 2004. By 2022, there were 13 finless porpoise reserves around the country.
The idea of these protected areas is to limit human activity and ensure the animals have suitable habitats: shallow waters near the banks of a river or lake, with plenty of food and good water quality.
China’s Regulations on Nature Reserves explicitly ban the extraction of sand, fish, and the building of any industrial facilities within a reserve, and also require the setting up of a management body staffed by professionals.
However, the Institute of Hydrobiology’s research found that some reserves are poorly managed, with illegal activity commonplace. The study focused on porpoise abundance and habitat quality inside and outside six FPAs on a 1,500km stretch of the Yangtze running from Yichang to Jiangyin. Factors linked with falling porpoise numbers include urban disturbance, agricultural expansion, and degradation of floodplain habitats.
The study did not cover Poyang Lake, but Jia Ci, a wetland researcher and a co-founder of local biodiversity group Nature Unfolded, thinks the reserve there is a classic paper park. He has made several field trips to the lake but found it hard to identify the organisation responsible for the reserve, he told Dialogue Earth.
Back in 2017, Southern Weekly reported there had never been an independent management body or ringfenced budget for the reserve, which in practice was run by the provincial government’s fisheries bureau. Dialogue Earth understands that the forestry authorities took over in 2020 but the reserve still lacks a management body and funding. In 2021, Economic Information Daily reported that the change meant reserve rangers no longer had powers to enforce the fisheries law.
Last year, the reserve was called out for its poor management. Cast nets were found being used inside the reserve. The Ministry of Ecology and Environment said the provincial authorities in charge – which includes the forestry authorities – were not doing enough to prevent fishing or protect the finless porpoise.
That March, dredging vessels were also found at work 2.7km away from the core area of the reserve, a place that vulnerable animals often inhabit. The inspectors also spotted two oil leaks from the vessels. Construction work is banned during fish spawning season between March and June.
Scarce rangers
Yuan Wenbin is aboard his boat by 7am every morning, patrolling areas of the lake where the finless porpoise is found.
When the lake is full after rains, the animals roam further and he might find himself on the other side of the lake, in Duchang county. It’s a four-hour round trip. As he goes, he pulls old fishing gear from the water and keeps an eye out for any anglers. Once a week, when the weather is good, he tallies finless porpoise numbers.
Sometimes, when short-handed, the rangers aren’t able to respond promptly to reports of illegal activity or injured porpoises. Even after the fishing ban, he says, hook-and-line fishing is still a big problem.
The porpoises can’t spot fishing lines abandoned in the water. They get tangled up and struggle to escape, causing cuts to their flesh and potentially fatal infections.
You station someone over here, they start fishing over there. Post someone over there, they turn up somewhere elseYuan Wenbin
“You station someone over here, they start fishing over there. Post someone over there, they turn up somewhere else.” The rangers also have no law-enforcement powers, so need to call up fishery officials when necessary, Yuan adds.
Protecting the protected areas
The resources a protected area receives depends on its status, with national reserves the best supplied.
In 2012, Institute of Hydrobiology researcher Wang Kexiong headed up the writing of a 2016-2025 action plan for saving the finless porpoise. He pointed out in the plan that Poyang’s finless porpoise reserve would struggle to achieve its aims as it sat relatively low in the pecking order of reserves.
“At that point, it seemed Poyang Lake had the lion’s share of the work to do – of the 1,040 finless porpoises surviving at the time, it was home to over 400,” he tells Dialogue Earth, reflecting on the creation of the plan. But its status as a provincial reserve was “clearly not appropriate”, he explains. “I wanted it designated as a national reserve.”
The reserve should also have a dedicated, higher-level management body to make it more effective, he says.
Those upgrades would have meant more resources for the FPAs and taken the pressure off local governments. National protected areas are jointly funded by the local and national government, while local reserves only get funding from local government.
Since that plan was published, the Yangtze finless porpoise has been given greater protections, moving from Class II to Class I status. The reserve, though, has not been upgraded.
Drawing up reserves
Finless porpoises are constantly moving about, and if FPAs are to be effective, the designation of the areas needs to fully consider their migration patterns.
But, as pointed out in the Institute of Hydrobiology study, half of areas with “high abundance” of porpoises, and two-thirds of those with “medium abundance”, are not covered by existing reserves.
According to Wang, who co-authored the study, this is because three of the finless porpoise reserves in the study were originally set up to protect the baiji. He says: “What they actually did at the time was repurpose baiji reserves as porpoise reserves. And there were porpoises there, of course, but they weren’t the focus when the reserves were set up.”
In the 2016-2025 action plan, he suggested designating as protected areas places with more finless porpoises, such as the stretch of the Yangtze running from Ezhou in Hubei to Anqing in Anhui, and the parts of Poyang Lake around Bali River. But there was little support from local government and this still hasn’t happened.
The Institute of Hydrobiology researchers also suggest improving protections for medium- and high-abundance areas. Alongside setting up new FPAs, the 2020 Yangtze Protection Law can designate areas outside reserves as important aquatic habitats, with restrictions on shipping and dredging. This would complement the existing reserves.
Local organisations are also trying to make in situ conservation more flexible. Jiang Meng, secretary-general of the Nanjing Finless Porpoise Conservation Association, says they have been experimenting with “conservation zones” in parts of the river with important ecological roles. They patrol and monitor the zones to help protect key species.
Overall, Wang thinks nature reserves do help protect the finless porpoise, particularly in reducing human activity, but the key protected areas need to be redrawn quickly when ecological and environmental changes require it.
That kind of flexible approach needs rich local knowledge. Yuan has been helping protect the finless porpoise for eight years now and knows the animal so well he can sit at home and tell you where on the lake you’re most likely to spot one that day.
While he now has a job with the county fisheries bureau, he keeps up his volunteer work and sails all over the lake. “Wherever the porpoises go, I’ll follow,” he says.
And he hopes more will join him, adding: “The best way to protect the finless porpoise is to get involved.”
